The present specification generally relates to proximity service peer discovery as well as proximity service session management (i.e. session set-up and session release), which is assisted by the network, to which the communication subscribers of such proximity service session are connected.
Proximity services of Long Term Evolution (LTE) are just started to be feasibility studied by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) system aspects working group 1 (SA1), which substantially defines the service requirements for 3GPP systems, under work item “Feasibility Study for Proximity-based Services” (FS_ProSe). At that, the main service scenario for proximity services under LTE is identified as peer-to-peer (P2P) communication between terminals.
That is, a direct terminal to terminal communication without a detour via the network takes place in proximity service communication. Thereby, terminals implementing LTE proximity services will utilize LTE licensed spectrum for direct communication with other terminals for e.g. data sharing.
If a set-up of such proximity service communication is based on a pure peer-to-peer fashion, e.g. the layer 1/2 techniques as Bluetooth, a considerable risk for a terminal of being hacked by denial of service (DoS) attacks arises. Even in case of no attack but of a normal communication request (connection initiation) from another proximity service terminal, it is difficult for the called terminal (receiving subscriber) to authenticate the user identity in the calling party (initiating subscriber).
Hence, the problem arises that a communication set-up performed by only the involved proximity service subscribers, i.e. the terminals intended to perform terminal to terminal communication entails security risks for the involved subscribers and that usage of LTE licensed band in case of such independent connection management is uncontrolled.
Consequently, there is a need to provide for network assisted proximity service session management.
Since this new aspect of LTE is totally different from traditional telecommunications services in LTE, there is no related technical background available.